In general yes, they solved their manufacturing issues on the Model 3 line and it reached the required speeds and saved the company. See the cashflow turnaround in 2018-2019. They managed to scale that line far beyond their initial targets.
However that experience did teach them that their design was flawed and for future vehicles after Model 3 they did switch to large castings anyway rather then traditional welding of stamping.
If you are interested in the flaws of the initial Model 3, see this interview with Elon and Sandy Munro where the discuss this:
They didn't have that for all the development of Falcon 9. SpaceX deliberately vertically integrated and moved to automotive and other suppliers because space suppliers were so bad.
I would be surprised if they have to use this process all that often, specially now that they have reduced construction rates.
He has Degrees in physics, and many people with such degrees end up getting positions in engineering companies and are called engineers. He was accepted at Standford PHd program for materials science. That would natural lead into an Materials engineering position in some company if completed.
Of course instead of doing that, he left and started companies, as a software engineer he was the core developer one Zip2 and early on on PayPal. If that doesn't qualify you as an engineer I don't know what does.
Literally he has been the Chief Engineer at SpaceX since its founding. And the argument that its just an empty title just don't work. They were a small company for quite a while and somebody made all the final decisions. The are multiple stories where he works directly with other engineers on the rocket as well if 'making engineering decisions' is not enough. Multiple former employees have directly contradicted these sort of 'not engineer claim'.
Just recently former lead engineer at Ford with 50 years experience in automotive, defense and aerospace was allowed to sit in on a meeting for Starship. He said he had never seen anybody CEO be that involved in detailed decisions, about manufacturing processes and design choices and so on.
So just because you don't like him or his product, doesn't make him not an engineer. He has the education many other people that call themselves engineers have, and he has the title of engineer and that title has been officially recognized by NASA and DoD.
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Elon is both the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of SpaceX, so of course he does more than just ‘some very technical work’. He is integrally involved in the actual design and engineering of the rocket, and at least touches every other aspect of the business (but I would say the former takes up much more of his mental real estate). Elon is an engineer at heart, and that’s where and how he works best.
Former Head of Software Quality Assurance at SpaceX
I think Elon being a true polymath scares a lot of insecure engineers out there. They’ve gotten used to being pampered and told they’re special, and here is a goddamn billionaire business guy who could do their job also. It’s just too much to swallow.
People see what he's done as a criticism of their own failings and missed opportunities. I've never seen grapes more sour than the ones devoured by anti-Tesla/Musk folks (apparently by the electric truckload.)
This is interesting. I suppose Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are less threatening since they don’t work on hardware but other polymaths exist. Certainly I believe John Carmack of Id Software and Armadillo Aerospace is one - and the latter is hardware.
I think he's referring to his tendency to pick weird twitter fights.
I have tons of respect for what Musk has done with Tesla and SpaceX, but it's undeniable that some of his tweets should not have been sent. And while I generally appreciate weirdos, he's a bit much sometimes.
Ok, somebody being competitive on twitter means that person is mentally unstable?
I mean you want to call him a asshole fine, but doesn't mean he is unstable.
If everybody that gets on fight on twitter or is sending tweets that shouldn't be sent is considers 'unstable' then most people on twitter are unstable.
This just sounds so crazy complex. It requires completely changing existing infrastructure. A lot more energy moving around (and that is not efficient).
If actually cared about efficiently transferring to fight climate change, and not build a utopia. We would simply create a list of all coal power stations, order them by age and then start building a nuclear plant right next to one after the other as fast as possible.
If you did it that way, you could in less then 20 years basically make your grid green. Most people wouldn't notice anything what so ever. No new infrastructure would need to be build. It would be reliable in basically all situations. And it would give you a very large base of highly educated engineers and technicians.
Compare that to just importing tons of PV from China and putting up tons of new transition lines.
> but there are readily available seasonal storage choices
Are there? Non have been deployed and if you look at modeling these need to be essentially free to actually happen.
> Iron-air looks economically viable
One startup claims this, they have not shown a prototype or given specs, it will not be commercially deployed for a few years. Its a bit early to claim its viable.
Fact is, storage beyond 2h is totally unproven. Most companies that have worked in this direction have failed.
> Electrolysed hydrogen, either stored directly or as ammonia. Just need PV prices to fall a bit, which is expected, and the cost of electrolysis to fall, which is happening.
Using direct heat is simply a better option then electrolysis on large scale. With advanced nuclear you can use nuclear heat to crack steam. Far better option.
It sounds like the market. Hayek was right: we don't need to plan this, we just need to let lots of people try to seize opportunities, and we'll get fairly close to an optimum.
And as I have said elsewhere, the costs are inevitable. Existing plant is wearing out and has to be replaced, one way or another.
What we're arguing about is who gets the money: fossil fuel miners, or entrepreneurs. Let the market sort it out.
You have government guided utilities and fake markets with fake pricing plus lots of intensives.
There are externalizes all over the place and there is strange mix between public and private that is hard to understand. Solar still gets incentives when they produce energy at negative prices for example. Fossil fuel has a huge negative externalize, and while I believe free market often produces good solutions for externalizes, it doesn't work on a global scale.
So you have issues on the traditional prices, you have the subsidies renewables that are pushed by mandates (ie you have to deploy 30% renewables) and in addition to that, renewable just use the grid as storage and let the grid provider worry about the problem and you have nuclear that is essentially blocked from developing.
Dispatch-able power is vastly under-priced in most markets.
Markets work if price intensifies carry real information, and in electricity markets have to many structural problems.
What should be done is what NASA did for space station supply. Select 5-10 competitors for next generation nuclear let them develop different concepts and go threw a multi round process where the company and the regulator learn, you end up building 3 and then promise at that you are gone order min. 3 more reactors from two of them. That would actually get nuclear in the market in a real way.
The crazy thing is that the government actually HAS the money to run this competition. Nuclear reactor providers have paying into an account for a long, long time. There are billions and billions available but its just a political issue that its not happening.
For better or for worse, energy is something government has been deeply and fundamentally involved with, 'the market' will not converge on the right solution in this situation.
The free market approach would probably work because nuclear has incredible energy density. And during the day, solar is crazy cheap.
The polluting energy sources are more expensive. How fucking lucky is that!
But I don't think nuclear deregulation will motivate the rapid change we require to avoid climate disaster. Carbon tax would help, I think, but there is zero chance it will be implemented on the global scale. (Fuck our lives, right?)
I actually think that if one country can seriously prove out modern GenIV reactors everybody will adopt them.
There is a serious chance you can power most of the global population by building reactors and putting them on ships. Most people live on the coast.
The most scary place is actually Indonesia, they literally have 100s of coal plants in development. Gigantic population and nothing other then coal. Thankfully the government there is actually aware of the problem and they are working with a nuclear reactor company called Thorcon.
This is a bit fishy because Indonesia doesn't actually have a regulator that is internationally accepted, but they are trying to build that at the same time. I am skeptical but its a great effort.
In Canada you have Terrestrial Energy and Moltex Energy doing amazing things. Terrestrial Energy is furthest along.
In the US you Kairos Power that seems active, and thankfully the regulator is starting to open up.
The regulatory system makes them ESSENTALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Seriously, if people only knew how fucked up the regulatory system is.
Unless you are NASA or DoD you can fuck right of with that stuff.
The regulatory system is HARD LOCKED to one technology. No sane person would invest money in an alternative (unless you are planning on selling it to DoD). The regulatory system had to be changed a huge amount, just for NuScale PWR in a module reactors.
If you wanted for example to build a Molten Salt reactor there is no established regulatory path. Or a small reactor either. There is only tiny research reactors, or fully operational reactors. So you can't even build a small version of your reactor to prove things out. No prototyping for you.
You would basically have to show up with a full design (literally invest 100s of million) then go to the regulator and hand it in. You would also pay them to review and you would literally have to wait years, and potentially decades for them to tell you if your design is good. You would get no early feed-back on what they might consider problems or issues. And there is no criteria what exactly the application needs to look like or how much detail they want and so on. There is no established software that they accept as valid for modeling something like uranium in molten salt. If you are not providing real data its very hard convince them on anything, but of course, you can not actually get real data from anywhere.
That is why essentially no progress has been made. Thankfully in the last 5 years or so, actual progress has been happening and the regulator has admired that there is a problem. The don't have actual solution yet but they are apparently working on improving the situation. That is why, almost all GenIV nuclear startups have converged on Canada. The Canadian regulator after its privatization of CANDU was looking for something to do and they were very open to next generation technology. Their regulatory process is a multi-step process that is technology independent.
It looks like US regulator and the Canada regulator are working together so hopefully Canada can lead the US out of its idiocy.
What you must realize is that the turn against nuclear was hard, on all fronts. Population, Politics, Regulation went totally anti-nuclear and specially for anything that wasn't established. Since Nuclear Commission was abolished, progress has been glacial.
Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program, not 20 years ago and not now. This has been proven again and again. Even the CIA confirmed as much and told this to Bush and every other president since.
Iran has the best monitored nuclear industry in the world by a large margin. Iran is a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty (unlike US or Israel) and always had the proper monitoring.
The Iran nuclear-weapons is pure political thing power play by the US. It has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and everything with Iran not wanting to accept US power.
Iran literally didn't even want to do this infrastrucutre. They had a deal with France to provide them with low enriched nuclear fuel, and France would then take the spent fuel back. All this monitored by the IAEA according to international non-proliferation standards. The US got involved and prevented any such deal.
Only then Iran then started trying to make its own fuel instead. They literally had zero infrastructure to do any of that stuff. The US basically forced them to develop the infrastructure themselves. As soon as they did this, US started claiming they were building nuclear weapons.
> Iran is a signatory of the non-proliferation treaty (unlike US or Israel)
The US, contrary to your claim, is a party to the NPT, but as one of the five recognized nuclear powers under the treaty it applies somewhat differently to the US.
